Don’t Ask For Details About the War in Afghanistan Anymore

The Pentagon has decided that informing the taxpayers, even the friends and family of those now serving in Afghanistan, even the friends and family of those wounded, even killed in Afghanistan, is just too much of a burden to them.

Previously, the success barometer in Afghanistan was based on the number of Afghani troops effectively trained, but now that measure is gone and no measure has been issued to take it place.

The Pentagon has pretty much decided that it’s time to quite telling anyone, outside of their gang, what exactly progress in Afghanistan is AND, once you define what progress means, then delivering updates on the status of that progress.

In other words, listen kids, there’s a war going on in Afghanistan where we’re fighting for your freedom. Don’t ask us why we’re fighting for your freedom there. Don’t ask us what winning means. And DEFINITELY don’t ask us to tell you how the hell we’re doing.

For the last 16 years, the Pentagon’s “progress” in the occupation of Afghanistan has been measured by officials through multiple different statistics, and one most often cited has been the size of the Afghan military. Those numbers have struggled recently, with Afghanistan not recruiting well nor retaining its recruits. So that’s not a metric anymore.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko, regularly critical of secrecy in Afghanistan, noted that “The Afghans know what’s going on, the Taliban knows what’s going on, the US military knows what’s going on. The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people paying for it.”

When Pentagon officials later said that the decision to keep the numbers secret was at the behest of unnamed Afghan officials, Sopko shot back “the government usually doesn’t classify good news. I don’t want any nameless, faceless Afghan bureaucrat telling the American taxpayer what they ought to know.”

While the Afghan bureaucrat serves as a scapegoat, keeping details about Afghan war woes away from the American public has been a top priority for President Trump for months, with his Afghan policy speech centering on the importance of being secretive about America’s intentions, and the large US escalation of troops in Afghanistan Trump announced itself was never specifically numbered.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
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